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Notes from the Editor

Wowzers, Kids!

Numerous [Liberty BASIC] superstars have made contributions for this issue! There is a veritable hurricane of good stuff inside! So, lash yourselves to the mainsail, laddies, lest you be blown away!

[Alyce Watson] continues to share with us the remarkable development of Eddie, the code editor written in Liberty BASIC for Liberty BASIC! In the current article, Alyce discusses four new features of Eddie: filedialogs with a memory; the trick to avoiding reading past the end of file; locating and running Freeform; and locating and running the LB Help File. Even if you haven't been following Eddie's development to date, I recommend that you read this article thoroughly. There is plenty of cool stuff in there that can be incorporated in any LB program! Nice job, Alyce!

Hey, this is fun! Janet Terra has produced a followup article exploring ways to access MS Agents and MS Office Characters from within Liberty BASIC. (Her first article appeared in [Issue #126].) Use Janet's current demo to call Microsoft's Merlin onto your desktop. (To find out what other agents are available on your own system, search your entire hard drive using "*.acs" as a search string. Once other agents are located, you can call them up using Janet's demo.) As always, Janet's demos are easy to follow while yielding impressive results!

Kids, the list of things that Liberty BASIC can't do just got shorter by one. In Janet Terra's second article, she discusses a way to create a point-and-click adventure game in Liberty BASIC. Using Janet's point-and-click demo as a starting point, it's not as hard as you might think. I also thoroughly enjoyed Janet's brief history of the text-adventure game! Way to go, Janet!

Next, Jerry Muelver hops aboard with an article on parsing html source text. Specifically, Jerry shows how to extract the URLs that reference image files in an html document of your choosing. It's pretty slick, and easy to follow, too! Copy Jerry's demo into your Liberty BASIC Editor. Save an html file to the same folder as the demo, and rename the file, file.html. Then, run the demo and watch it extract all references to images. The capabilities of this simple parsing method can be expanded easily. Jerry concludes his article by identifying a few of those opportunities, such as wrapping a GUI around the parser to enable the user to extract various html tags on the fly. Nice job, Jerry!

Don't go away, storm chasers! More members of the A-Team are reporting for duty!

Why might you want to check the length of a web-hosted file, and how would you do it? The talented Brent Thorn provides a nice demo which shows how this can be done. This procedure might be useful in determining a file's "freshness", as Brent calls it. The demo assumes that the user has an internet connection, so make sure that you are "on line" before you run it. Thanks, Brent, and submit a few more goodies!

Next Noble Bell hops into the whirlwind with an article about automatic updating for the users of your LB applications! Noble takes great care in explaining what the programmer needs to do to set up before using Noble's updating application. Then he follows that with a detailed explanation as to how the version-checking and downloading procedure works. Thanks, Noble, for providing us with an effective and understandable solution!

See, I told you things are cookin'!

With impeccable timing, Alyce Watson follows Noble Bell with an API Corner article documenting the URLDownloadToFileA function contained with the MSWindows library, URLmon.dll. And what do you do with a web-hosted file once you download it? Well, read the article and grow, my friends! Alyce has, once again, made the mysterious world of the Windows API accessible to the rest of us. Thanks, Alyce!

Last and least, Nally closes out the issue with a short article about what to expect when Version 1.0 of the Liberty BASIC Wire Frame Library comes out in an issue or two. The library has advanced to 1.0, but the demos are not quite ready.

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Me, Oh My! Ethel just authorized me to go buy the Honeymooners on DVD, and then pick up some shrimp etouffee to go at the country store. Life is good. Oh yes, life is good!

Liberty BASIC Newsletter 136 is now secure. Nally out.

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